Utility industries (such as gas, electric and water) or other providers of similar types of commodities typically require a system to monitor consumption of the commodity, e.g., a flowmeter to measure the volume of water used by a particular customer, so that the utility can bill that customer for the consumption. Such meters or the like generally include a sensor or other form of measurement that detects, for example, the volume of the commodity used over a given period of time and converts that value into a format compatible with an available data collection system. Toward this end, it has often been necessary to provide a particular meter encoder output format in order to be compatible with the existing utility data collection system. This requirement for a specific meter encoder output format limits a utility's ability to collect data through its existing data collection network from other devices, such as sewer meters and pressure sensors, which typically provide an analog or digital output but not an encoder formatted output.